Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

A Patent Surfaces Detailing a Facebook Smartphone

In a patent filed by Facebook, the company has explored building a smartphone that has a touch interface on the side or rear of the device.Credit Screenshot, via Patent Bolt

Over the last several years, there have been dozens of reports about Facebook building a smartphone.

In 2010, TechCrunch reported that Facebook was secretly building a mobile device. In 2011, AllThingsD reported that Facebook and HTC had entered a partnership to create a smartphone, code-named “Buffy.” And in 2012, I reported in a Disruptions column that Facebook was pouring resources into the development of a mobile phone.

In all these instances, it turned out that while Facebook was a natural at building great mobile software, the company’s engineers were having a difficult time perfecting the hardware.

“Can a company that is wired as a social network learn how to build hardware?” I wrote in 2012 about the company’s troubles entering the smartphone market. “Mixing the cultures of hardware and software designers is akin to mixing oil and water.”

“Now a Facebook smartphone patent has surfaced showing us that they’ve been working on a smartphone since 2011 and that they’re continually refining it,” Patent Bolt wrote in a blog post explaining the finding. “Surprisingly, Facebook makes it clear that they want their hardware to have a distinct physical twist to it so that it stands out from the crowd of me-too products.”

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

So what makes this Facebook phone so different? For one, the phone featured in the patent has a screen on the front of the device — like traditional smartphones — but unlike other devices, it also has a touch pad along the side.

In another version of the patent, the side-mounted touch pad is replaced with a clickable button, and a large touch pad on the rear of the phone is added to the device. In this instance, you could imagine being able to interact with content on the screen by tapping your fingers on the side or back of the smartphone.

Patent Bolt notes that the phone would use a “gesture recognition library” that could determine different finger movements on the touch pads. Flicking up on the rear of the phone may perform one distinct action, while flicking down, or sideways, would perform another action.

According to the filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Facebook patent application was originally made by Matthew Papakipos, a lead engineer at Facebook, and Matthew Cahill, who has since left Facebook to work at Quip. (That company was founded by Bret Taylor, Facebook’s former chief technology officer who also worked on the Facebook smartphone.)

This isn’t the only patent Facebook has explored for a smartphone design. The company appears to have filed a number of patents for smartphones with unique interfaces and interactions.

In another patent filed by the company in late 2011, Facebook appeared to be exploring a smartphone with a curved surface. In the patent, “Mobile Device with Concave Shaped Back Side,” Facebook noted a number of ways that people could interact with the phone, and also wrote that “the concavely-shaped back side may protect the touch surface from accidental activations and abrasions.”

In another patent filing, “Content Scrolling and Transitioning Using Touchpad Input,” Facebook explored the idea of using the side of a phone to scroll through content on the phone’s screen.

Last year, when Facebook introduced Facebook Home, which is customized Android software that centers on Facebook’s apps, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, denied that he had plans to make a smartphone.

When asked by Steven Levy of Wired magazine, “Why not just build a phone?” Mr. Zuckerberg said that he didn’t think that was the right strategy for the company, and Mr. Levy noted that reports of a Facebook phone were a “red herring.”

“We’re a community of a billion-plus people, and the best-selling phones — apart from the iPhone — can sell 10, 20 million. If we did build a phone, we’d only reach 1 or 2 percent of our users. That doesn’t do anything awesome for us,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.

Though based on dozens of previous reports and patents filed in 2011, it seems that Facebook has been exploring building a smartphone all along. Now that’s a red herring.